Fresh Footprints - In Search Of A Lost Godنموونە

God ‘speaks’; he communicates and reveals himself through three books.

Book one – the book of nature. 

The created world may not ultimately prove the existence of God but it does tell us what God is like if he does exist. So, it is a legitimate artistic and scientific inquiry to look for the shape of God in the shape of nature. 

Wherever we look we discover a pattern of waves – from sea shells to spiral galaxies, from leaf nodes spiraling round the stalk, water ripples, the pattern of the seasons. Even our ability to see and hear, our very DNA, our heart beats, all exhibit this overriding rise and fall and rise again. God has rhythm at his heart.

Book two – the Bible.

We must read the Bible honestly for it is a very truthful book. It doesn’t shrink from the realities of human frailty and perversity; Flawed heroes, villains who sometimes do good; ordinary people who do amazing things. It is a tale of sacrifice, selfishness and greed, of sex, war and violence, all mixed up with joy, hope and perseverance in the belief that love triumphs over evil.

What begins with the origin of intelligent humans in an idyllic garden, ends with the renewal of the entire cosmos – the redemption of the redeemable, the mending of the mendable, the healing of the healable.

Sometimes we find ourselves agreeing, and at others disagreeing, for this Bible is a mirror that enables us to see ourselves in the light of the possibility of God. We are meant to argue with it, to disagree, but to reflect on why we argue and why we disagree. 

Again we are seeking a pattern. As with the natural world we find a repeating waveform, a shape, like a coiled spring. Rising, falling, rising again. 

Jesus of Nazareth appears as God’s Son who abandoned heaven’s splendour, humbled himself to live as one of us, to the point of becoming the blame-taker for all our misdeeds. Dying a cruel, sacrificial death, God raised him from the dead and promoted him to rule the universe. Life, death, resurrection; the pattern of salvation.

Book three – ourselves.

We too exhibit the pattern, the rhythm of life death, and resurrection. Monthly cycles of fertility, menstruation and renewal; waking, working, weariness; sleep and reawakening; hunger, replenishment, fullness, hunger again; desire, gratification, satisfaction, desire again.